I Hear Words in the Air

Ahh, back from vacation and raring to go! Sorry for the delay between posts, but I was out of town and well out of internet range for a long weekend. Fresh air, a little snow and sunshine – it was awesome. Got a bunch of reading done, and almost no writing.

But I’m not too hung up on that. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about myself, it is this: I have a tendency to force myself to slog through an unpleasant situation, when all I have to do to make the situation more bearable is take a break. So I’ve been having a hard time on my novel. It’s getting to be wearisome and it feels like the end will never come. I needed a break bad.

So now, I’m ready to do again. The time issues I mentioned in my previous post are still there, and I’m still working through them, but I’m ready to start pushing again. Once I fall into the groove, I have no doubt that a lot of my little problems will fall by the wayside. They always do, so I’m going to just leave my oh-so-comfortable self-doubt module right now.

In other news, I have what may turn out to be my very first “writing gig.” I don’t think I ever mentioned it here, but I’m a member of a brand-new organization here in the Portland area: the Northwest Independent Writers Association. We’re a bunch of self-published (or, in my case, wanna-be) speculative fiction writers basically looking for collaboration and moral support. We meet monthly and online at our Google group (hint: check yonder link to the left).

Our first sort of collaboration is the production of an anthology of short stories written by the group’s members. The format and content are still out in the open, but it’s very likely that it’ll be used as a marketing tool for our other work at conventions and so forth. At the very least, demonstrating that I can write for others and to a deadline is highly marketable.

Good thing I have all this time to work on both projects. Oh, wait.

In other, totally unrelated news, I’ve been kind of into Warhammer 40K for the last week or so. I’ve never played the wargame or even read the rules, but the dystopian space fantasy setting is pretty much entirely within my wheelhouse. Also, Dan Abnett is an excellent writer and I’m sad that HBO will probably never make a war-themed miniseries about his Gaunt’s Ghosts series.